Does python have a sorted list?

Question

By which I mean a structure with:

• O(log n) complexity for x.push() operations
• O(log n) complexity to find an element
• O(n) complexity to compute list(x) which will be sorted

I also had a related question about performance of list(...).insert(...) which is now here.

Answer 1

Is there a particular reason for your big-O requirements? Or do you just want it to be fast? The sortedcontainers module is pure-Python and fast (as in fast-as-C implementations like blist and rbtree).

The performance comparison shows it benchmarks faster or on par with blist's sorted list type. Note also that rbtree, RBTree, and PyAVL provide sorted dict and set types but don't have a sorted list type.

If performance is a requirement, always remember to benchmark. A module that substantiates the claim of being fast with Big-O notation should be suspect until it also shows benchmark comparisons.

Disclaimer: I am the author of the Python sortedcontainers module.

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Installation:

pip install sortedcontainers

Usage:

>>> from sortedcontainers import SortedList
>>> l = SortedList()
>>> l.update([0, 4, 1, 3, 2])
>>> l.index(3)
3
>>> l.add(5)
>>> l[-1]
5